


though he be but little, he is fierce

by Star_Going_Supernova



Series: teeny tiny murder machines [1]
Category: Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019)
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Fluff, Gen, Monster-Human Friendship, Post-Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019), hand-wavy magic or something, tiny!Godzilla
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:27:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22057759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_Going_Supernova/pseuds/Star_Going_Supernova
Summary: Castle Bravo has to deal with an incredibly unexpected intruder.
Relationships: Godzilla (Legendary | MonsterVerse) & Madison Russell, Madison Russell & Mark Russell, Mark Russell & Rick Stanton
Series: teeny tiny murder machines [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1601329
Comments: 31
Kudos: 159





	though he be but little, he is fierce

**Author's Note:**

> This is from a request by an anon who wanted shrunken!Godzilla and Maddie taking care of him, much to her father’s displeasure. There’s a certain amount of ridiculousness to this, but I’m pleased with how it turned out. 
> 
> Thanks, Shakespeare, for the title, which is honestly me thinking I’m funny. 
> 
> Hope you guys enjoy my last story of the decade!

Castle Bravo’s alarms went off in that period of time where even the night owls were sleeping and the early risers had not yet risen—the liminal space known as 3:30 a.m. or so. It started everyone awake, save for the small number of employees running the graveyard shift, and absolutely no one was happy about it.

Mark Russell opened his door to find his daughter blinking tiredly at him from her own. She didn’t look fully awake, though he doubted he looked any better.

“Tell me s’not the fire alarm,” she mumbled.

“Proximity, I think…” he said, more to himself than her.

She shook her head and listed sideways against the doorjamb. “Proximity goes woo-woo, not err-err.”

This made sense at 3:30 in the morning, so Mark nodded.

“Well,” Maddie said when he didn’t respond. “If s’not fire, ’m goin’ back to sleep.” She turned and vanished into the darkness of her bedroom, letting the door click closed behind her.

Mark desperately wanted to do the same—his sheets were probably still warm and cozy—but he was, regrettably, an adult, and adults were supposed to make sure the world wasn’t ending when an alarm went off.

Still in his sweats and t-shirt, and without bothering to hunt down shoes in the dark, Mark shuffled down the dimly lit corridor—thank goodness the night cycle lights were still on—in search of someone with answers.

In the first floor below housing, he found a bed-headed Rick running around like a headless chicken. He was grumbling loudly, though Mark couldn’t make out what had him in such a state.

“What’s going on?” he asked after a minute of watching. He felt marginally more awake, though his dry eyes wanted to disagree.

Rick whirled to face him and immediately started on a furious diatribe that Mark only caught half of. He caught the important part, though: this alarm announced intruders on the base.

He was suddenly all attentiveness, his heart racing. “It’s not Jonah’s crew, is it?” he blurted out.

It was the sort of panicked question with exactly the right kind of backstory that made Rick not mind being interrupted. He paused in his tapping against a touchscreen to meet Mark’s eyes. “No,” he said, “it’s not.”

Mark breathed a sigh of relief as his protective father instincts calmed down.

“I’m more inclined to think it was a malfunction, actually,” Rick continued. He gestured at the screen, and Mark crossed the room to join him. “Can’t find anyone.” He stood and cracked his neck. “Better be safe than sorry, though. Gonna check with security, see if they found something I didn’t.”

Rick picked up a discarded robe and slung it over his shoulders like it was leather jacket in an action movie. Looking Mark up and down, he asked, “You wanna come?”

Gratifyingly, when Mark peeked, he saw his fellow tired scientist to also be barefoot. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

• • •

Security was as baffled as Rick had been. They had gone through all the camera footage for up to an hour before the alarm was triggered, only to find no disturbances whatsoever. They’d even sent out pairs to check in person, in case the cameras had been tampered with.

It was a mystery.

“Most of the base is underwater,” head of security, Greg something—Mark was drawing a blank on the guy’s last name, and since he was out of uniform like every other sane man at nearly 4 a.m., there was no name tag to check—rubbed his hands down his face. “So the intruder alarm going off _alone_ shouldn’t be possible. We have alarms for approaching aircraft, proximity sensors for underwater vehicles as small as a drone, the hangar doors are taken offline overnight. If there’s someone in here who shouldn’t be, the intruder alarm should _not_ have been the first thing to go off.”

“Malfunction?” Rick asked for the third time.

“What about a lone diver?” Mark asked.

Greg spared a glare at Rick before thinking about Mark’s question. “A person probably wouldn’t be noticed by the underwater sensors. We had to calibrate those to bigger, mechanical things so fish wouldn’t set them off every few minutes. And, well, the only living thing significantly bigger than a human that dares to get close is Godzilla, and he’s got all his own systems.”

The man frowned. “Only problem is that we’d be getting a flood warning if they cracked through a wall, and there are just two doors below the surface, both of which are manually dead-bolted from the inside.” Greg shrugged and waved one of his team members up. “Go check anyway, will ya?”

Mark was starting to feel dead on his feet, and the thought of returning to his bed for a few more precious hours of sleep began to outweigh his desire to know more. From the way Rick’s eyes were drooping shut, his friend would agree with him.

And besides, there was nothing left for them to do. Security could handle it, if there actually was a problem, but by all accounts, there wasn’t one.

He hadn’t noticed earlier, what with how not-awake he’d been, but the base was hauntingly silent now that the alarm was off—though Mark thought his ears were still ringing. With nothing to keep the adrenaline going, he was about ready to crash.

“Well,” he said, popping his back a bit. “As long as you don’t think we’re in danger…”

Greg offered him a smile. “We should be just fine. You two go and get some more sleep, enjoy it for those of us who are officially on shift.”

Mark nodded gratefully at him as he nudged Rick towards the door. “Good luck, then, and I guess—”

A speaker on the console crackled to life. “Uh, sir? We have a bit of a situation.”

Greg sighed. “I just had to jinx it.” Turning around, he pressed a button and asked, “What’d you find, Al?”

“There is definitely something on the base.”

Mark could feel the rest of his night slipping away, and from Rick’s more aware-sounding groan, he wasn’t the only one. Both men returned to stand behind Greg’s chair.

“ _Something?_ Not someone?”

The man on the other end of the communication line, Al, grunted. “I’m looking at a small hole melted clean through the outer door of the oxygen chamber. The inner door’s secure, but whatever it was left another hole in the floor into the pump room.”

“So the base isn’t in danger of flooding?”

“I emergency sealed this door, so we’re clear.”

“Small mercies. Did you check the pump room?”

Here, Al sighed. “Yeah, and whatever it is is long gone. Forced the door open, left funny lookin’ impressions in the metal, and probably took off. Couldn’t have been too long ago, because it dripped all over the place. And here’s why I don’t think it’s a person: those are not human footprints, not unless that human is taking very small steps wearing fake paw-prints-with-claws on their shoes.”

Greg dropped his head to the desk. “Great,” he muttered. He turned back to Mark and Rick. “Don’t suppose that sounds familiar to either of you? Some underwater Bigfoot creature capable of melting through some of the toughest metal the industry has to offer?”

“Yeah,” Rick said. “Every time the G-man laughs, a mini Godzilla is born.”

For a moment, Greg looked ready to believe him. “You can’t do that to me, Stanton, not this early.”

A shout from Al’s line distracted Mark from trying not to laugh. It was followed by a loud clatter, like a lot of heavy boxes had been knocked over.

Serious once again, Greg leaned forward over the console. “Al? You all right? What happened?”

“I saw it! I saw it! It—a tail! It’s a crocodile, Greg, I swear it is!”

“A croc? You think a croc managed to break in here? You had last shift off, didn’t you? Were you drinking?”

The sound of panting prevented an immediate answer. “I know what I saw, Greg! I’m not staying down here another second on my own.”

Greg shook his head. Waving them away, he told them, “Hit the hay, I’ll make sure our ‘crocodile’ gets dealt with.”

With nothing left for them to do, and the mystery somewhat solved, Mark and Rick left the security hub. They’d have to be up in only a couple hours, but neither was willing to lose any more sleep—especially not over a ‘crocodile.’

“They say Skull Island’s got some freaky stuff on it,” Rick said as they headed back to the housing portion of the base. “Not too hard to imagine other places causing a little mutation here and there in the local wildlife.”

Mark nodded. If they were lucky, security—or maybe some of the more physically-minded G-team, if they were willing to help—would have their little intruder caught by the time they had to be up for real.

• • •

They were not lucky.

By 9 a.m., they’d still been hunting the thing down. It was like tracking something that knew you were tracking it, Barnes, who had gotten involved as Mark had predicted, told them. Whatever sort of creature it was, it was intelligent enough to send them on wild goose chases left and right. It made messes of different rooms, it left claw marks in the halls, it left burns on the doors. And yet, since Al’s initial sighting, there’d been no sign of the creature itself.

Life for most people in the base went on as normal, if not with a bit more paranoia. Finding out it had discovered the stairwell put a real dent in productivity.

Thankfully, no one had gotten hurt. Yet. Anything that could melt through several inches of metal was to be approached with extreme caution.

Mark fidgeted in his seat. Rick didn’t seem any more capable of focusing than he did. Ilene was off base, though they’d updated her on the situation, to visit the outpost watching over Mothra’s egg.

“Y’know, Serizawa would be running around like a kid in a candy store, looking for this thing,” Rick said absently. “Making discoveries, especially about the Titans—number one way to get him visibly excited.”

“He probably would’ve found it too, while the rest of the base was looking in all the wrong places.”

Rick straightened up. “Hey, that’s an idea.” He grinned and pushed his chair closer to Mark. “Why don’t we go about this like he would’ve? Put on our Serizawa thinking-caps and go monster hunting?”

Mark took one last look at the documents he was supposed to be looking over. He was on the fourth page and couldn’t have even recall the general topic it was covering. “Count me in,” he said.

• • •

Accompanied by a few armed members of security—the only way they were allowed to wander in areas the creature was thought to be—Mark wasn’t sure who was more surprised when they finally found the thing: them, or the little intruder.

The little intruder who bore a disturbingly similar appearance to the ocean’s resident Titan. It was only about two and a half feet tall, but still identical to Godzilla down to the last detail.

Stumbling upon it, after everyone had stared dumbly for a few seconds, had resulted in the sort of chase sequence appropriate for a cartoon. Especially when the Titan-mimic reached an elevator and succeeded in sending it up, which was honestly a little terrifying.

One of the security men called in their predicament, even as they all rushed up the stairs, and asked if there weren’t some heavy-duty tranquilizers available.

When they burst out of the stairwell onto the floor the elevator had been headed for, all Mark could hear for a second was screaming and shouting. And something else, he realized after a moment, though it took a few seconds for his brain to identify the noise.

It was the sound of Godzilla’s _delightful_ atomic breath, albeit much quieter. Smoke drifted along the ceiling a few hallways down, and that was where their little group headed. They found quite a mess.

Lines of scorched metal trailed along the walls and ceiling, and several unfortunate, pale-faced people littered the floor, most with eyes wide with fear but unharmed. A man in a security uniform was clutching his leg, blood splattered around him.

“It bit me!” he said, sounding rather disbelieving. “It actually bit me!”

Further on was a woman whose arm was badly burned. She looked to be in shock, so one of their group broke off to escort her to medical.

Just as they reached the next intersection, Greg and Colonel Foster joined them, along with a woman from the biology side of the research department, Dr. Reagan. She held a tranquilizer gun, which she lifted once their groups merged.

“Any takers?” she asked.

• • •

The thing _shook it off_. They’d somehow managed to corner the Godzilla-lookalike in a large lab area, preemptively emptied of its personnel—though only after they’d encountered another victim with teeth marks. The little guy had looked dazed for all of a few seconds after the dart buried itself in its scales, and then it went right back to growling menacingly.

Mark tried to ignore his panic, because now they were all in the same room as a creature who couldn’t be tranquilized and seemed rather angry at their attempt to do so. His coworkers were much more verbal in their alarm at the situation.

The tiny Titan snarled at them, and despite its size, those teeth and glowing spines were just as intimidating as they were on the four hundred foot tall version. Maybe even more so, considering the uncomfortable proximity.

They were at an impasse. The armed humans had the only automated door covered, and if the little Titan tried to pry open any of the others, it’d not only lose time doing so, but it’d have to turn its back to them. But, on the other hand, regardless of weaponry, not a single human was willing to take another step closer to the charged mini-Godzilla.

The lab was still. No one spoke, and the static sensation from the radiation-charged energy had everyone on edge.

And then the door closest to the small Titan opened from the outside, leaving it a clear path out of the laboratory. Maddie stepped into view, just in time to register two things, the first being a crowd of people shouting for her to get out of the way or close the door.

The second was the lookalike charging straight for her, roaring surprisingly loudly.

Without a chance to think, Maddie reacted the same way as she had the last time a Titan had screamed at her: she screamed right back.

Not only did this shock the humans into silence, but the tiny Titan came to an immediate halt barely a yard in front of her, staring up at her face. Feet planted solidly against the floor, fists clenched at her sides, Maddie bared her teeth slightly, absolutely ready to do it again if necessary.

The adults held their breaths, waiting for something to happen. Godzilla’s mini-me lashed its tail around but made no move to attack her. In fact, after a long, drawn out stare-down, it twisted its head around enough to hiss at the group before inching a little closer to Maddie.

The teenager relaxed her stance, apparently convinced no further escape attempt would be made, and looked up to find her dad in the crowd. “So,” she said, “is this what that alarm last night was about?”

“Yeah.” Mark looked very much like he wanted to pull his daughter far away from the unknown danger standing at her feet. Maybe punt the creature out of atomic breath range while he was at it. “We don’t really know much more than how it got into the base. We were going to run some tests, see if we couldn’t figure out what it was, but it got away before—”

“It’s Godzilla,” Maddie interrupted him.

“I know it looks like Godzilla, but it—”

“No, it’s definitely Godzilla.” She looked down at the tiny Titan, and he looked up at her. She nodded after a few seconds. “Yeah, it’s him.”

Mark blinked and glanced around for help. Dr. Reagan stepped forward, but instead of trying to convince her otherwise, the doctor asked, “How can you tell?”

“I don’t know, I just…” Maddie gestured down at him. “I just can. Maybe it’s the eyes.”

“The eyes.”

“Or the way he looked running at me. Same as in Boston, only, y’know. Smaller.” She shrugged and crouched suddenly, nearly giving her dad a heart attack at how close her face now was to the Titan’s teeth. “You’re Godzilla, aren’t you?”

And to the adults’ astonishment, he rumbled, reared back, and sent a tiny spark of blue shooting into the air. Maddie laughed. Mark felt woozy.

“See?” Maddie said, smiling.

• • •

“Any idea of how this is possible?” Colonel Foster asked once they felt they were out of the immediate danger zone that was a tiny, angry Titan.

Dr. Reagan looked about ready to hurl herself off Castle Bravo. “Magic, science, I don’t know! The Titans don’t make sense, like at all! Mothra laid an egg, went and died by—what, dissolving her radiation into Godzilla?—and the egg, as far as we can tell, is going to hatch Mothra! I don’t understand that; do you? And now Godzilla’s a fraction of his own size and doesn’t seem to be suffering from that _at all_ and you want to know what caused it?”

She pressed her palm against her forehead, closed her eyes, and took a few deep breaths. “Sorry, Colonel. I just, I’m as confused as you are. I wish I could whip out some fancy device and wave it around like we’re in _Star Trek,_ but I can’t. This could be of his own doing, for all we know. He could be like this for a few days, for a few months, maybe for the rest of his life. I’d be more likely to find a cure for cancer than come up with the how and why for this.”

They all somberly took this in. Mark looked over at where his daughter sat in a chair, holding a big bowl of fish in her lap. She passed them down to Godzilla one by one with no apparent fear of getting her fingers bitten. He seemed happy enough, but how well could you really gauge a Titan’s emotions when their face didn’t emote like a humans would?

He wasn’t alone in his worry. Greg, who looked about as comfortable with the situation as Mark felt, asked, “So, what do we do with him?”

Dr. Reagan shrugged. “Depends, I guess.”

“On?”

“Whether you feel like wrestling a Titan.” She gestured over at the unnervingly calm scene across the room. Replace Godzilla with a dog, and it would’ve been heartwarming. As it was, the adults all felt like they were just waiting to hear a scream and be treated to the sight of gushing blood. “You couldn’t pay me enough to try and cage him when tranqs don’t work. So, the way I see it, we have two options. One, we risk life and limb to contain a fully-functional Titan who personally makes me believe that size doesn’t matter. Two and a half feet tall doesn’t mean squat to me when he’s still got laser breath.”

Mid-chew, Godzilla twisted to stare them down, as if he knew what they were talking about. Coincidence, or did he just have that good of hearing _and_ comprehension?

“Yeah, like I’ll have anything to do with that plan. What’s the second option?” Rick asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Let me guess,” Colonel Foster said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “We allow him to roam freely?”

“I was going to say we have Maddie keep dealing with him, but yeah, basically.”

Mark choked. “You want my daughter to—to play babysitter with a Titan fully capable of killing her?”

“Well, when you put it that way…” Rick muttered.

Dr. Reagan patted his arm. “I hate to say it, Mark, but just look. He hasn’t so much as snapped at her, and it’s been about half an hour. Medical’s got three people with Godzilla-inflicted injuries, and they weren’t even around him for five minutes. If he was going to hurt her, don’t you think he would’ve already?”

This was not as comforting as the good doctor was likely aiming for, and Mark had to swallow his rebuttals, all to the tune of _biding his time_. What if Godzilla was just waiting for her to open the door again, and then all bets were off?

“Hey, Dad.”

Mark looked over at his daughter, who had stood up and was now turning towards the door. He choked on his response.

“If you don’t need us for anything,” Maddie continued, “then we’re gonna wander. I think he’s getting restless.”

Godzilla didn’t seem to be anything to the adults, but then again, she was the only one who both recognized him and didn’t seem to be on his ‘to bite’ list. He was, however, glaring fiercely at them, as if daring anyone to try and stop them.

“Okay,” Mark croaked. “Stay safe, sweetheart.” As if she wasn’t walking away with a little murder machine at her heels.

She waved back at them over her shoulder and vanished out the door, holding it open just long enough for the tiny Titan to leave with her. Thankfully, there were no screams of pain or sounds of atomic breath being discharged.

Funny enough, the silence didn’t help Mark relax. Rick patted his shoulder in commiseration.

• • • 

The whole base spent the rest of the day walking on eggshells. People were quick to spread word when Maddie and Godzilla were spotted anywhere, so those who wanted to could avoid the area for their sanity’s sake.

Mark tried not to listen to the reports, but so many people seemed to want to update him personally, since his daughter was at the center of things.

They were seen on the upper deck, both looking ready to jump off the edge and go for a swim. The only reason they hadn’t, claimed one of the men who had witnessed it, was because there was no way for them to get back up once they went down. Yet.

The fish earlier apparently weren’t enough to satisfy even a small Titan’s stomach, so they were caught raiding the kitchen, though no one had the guts to actually _say_ something to them about it. Godzilla, according to one of the cooks, hadn’t looked terribly discerning about what he was devouring, and no one wanted to stray too close.

A few of the more daring members of Godzilla’s own research team managed to persuade Maddie to acquire a few samples—saliva and a chipped scale among them—though she’d tried to convince them it would be safe for them to do it themselves, provided they asked first. Curiosity wasn’t enough to sway them.

Godzilla also burnt the living daylights out of the walls in one of the lounges, for reasons people could only speculate on. The damage wasn’t pinpointed anywhere, and no one but Maddie had been with him at the time, so it was unlikely he’d been pissed off. Someone suggested it was the equivalent of a light show for his human friend, and though it was laughed off, Mark’s gut agreed.

Over the course of the day, he lost most of the tension thrumming through him. None of the stories featured his daughter in any danger, and that did wonders for his headache. If anything, the antics he heard about simply sounded like a twisted version of Calvin and Hobbes come to life.

It was interesting, though, to hear about the conflicting opinions regarding Godzilla’s presence. For a base dedicated to studying, tracking, and trying to understand the Titan, no one really wanted anything to do with him now, when he was most accessible. Their safety when he was full size but on the other side of the glass was an illusion—something they’d really gotten a taste of during the whole ORCA fiasco—but illusions could be powerful things.

Either way, they were more or less at Godzilla’s mercy. The only difference was how this situation took away part of that sense of security, false as it might be.

It was only when the stories stopped coming in, and all anyone could tell him was, “No, no one’s seen them in a little while now,” that Mark’s parental protective instincts kicked back in at full throttle. The base was large, but not that large, and he couldn’t imagine Maddie wandering into random storage rooms or other similarly deserted areas.

So where were they?

Dinnertime passed with further radio silence, and he could see his fellow concerned humans similarly waiting for the other shoe to drop while unwillingly letting down their guards. Night began to approach, and Mark was about ready to launch a search party.

She wasn’t responding to his texts, so before he set out to track Maddie down, Mark stopped by her room to see if she’d left her phone there.

He froze in the doorway, his hand clenching tightly around the frame. Maddie was asleep on her bed, and propped against the headboard was her laptop, the title screen for a movie looping softly in the darkness. She was on her stomach, surrounded by a veritable pillow nest and propped up by one beneath her head and shoulders.

The part that nearly gave Mark an aneurysm was the Titan tucked against her side. Godzilla’s back was to the door, and his head was somewhere between Maddie’s armpit and her pillow, which was entirely too close to his daughter’s heart, if you asked him.

Godzilla’s spines weren’t glowing with the potential to do damage, and that was the only reason Mark didn’t scream or, worse, faint. Not that anyone could’ve blamed him if he did either one.

Mark remained frozen, partially out of fear of startling Godzilla awake, and partially from indecision. What was a parent supposed to do when he found his daughter and the King of Titans curled up like characters from a wholesome dog-saves-the-day movie, obviously having fallen asleep in the middle of watching something. The floor even bore the evidence of dinner having taken place at some point.

Footsteps approaching him from down the corridor managed to drag Mark’s panicked eyes away from the scene in front of him. Rick gave him a weird look at whatever expression he was making, but obligingly stayed quiet at Mark’s frantic gesturing.

He stood at Mark’s shoulder and silently took in the scene. It was only when his shoulders shook slightly that Mark realized his friend wasn’t experiencing the same horror as him.

Suppressing his chuckles, Rick whispered, “Aw, c’mon, man, you have to admit that’s kinda cute.”

“If he yawns wrong, he could rip her throat out on accident,” Mark hissed back.

Rick shook his head. “I think he’d be more liable to rip yours out if you try to move either of them.”

Maddie shifted against the covers, turning slightly and drawing her knees up a little to, much to Mark’s further distress, curl towards Godzilla. Oddly enough, their positions brought to mind a memory from long ago, when Andrew and Maddie had worn themselves out and ended up on sharing the couch in front of the TV. The narrowness of the cushions had encouraged them to snuggle up.

He didn’t know how he felt, seeing something so similar now.

Rick slowly pulled him away and closed the door. “Let them sleep,” he said, and because he was a good friend when he wasn’t being sarcastic, he offered, “I think you’re underestimating Maddie. She’s seen enough and done enough to be aware of the danger and potential consequences of being close to a Titan like him. If she really trusts him not to hurt her…”

“Then he’s done something to earn that trust.”

“She’s a good kid, Mark. And I’m pretty sure the G-man knows it too. I mean, that trust? If nothing else, those two in there proves it goes both ways.”

Mark nodded. “You’re right. Might not keep me from worrying, but you’re right.” Something occurred to him and he straightened up. “Wait. What about when he goes back to his normal size? What happens then? She—Maddie—she can’t—Rick. Rick, stop _laughing,_ I’m serious! Rick!” 

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently, I really like writing Mark’s POV in regards to watching his daughter interact with the big (or small) scary Titan. 
> 
> Visit me at [my tumblr](https://star-going-supernova.tumblr.com/) for updates or to make requests or to just say hi! 
> 
> Comments and kudos are much appreciated!


End file.
